Frankonia-Versand of W9Frzburg runs two different businesses, both of them successful. The first is selling guns, ammunition, optical gear and clothing for hunters and outdoorsmen. The second is mail order sales of upscale clothing for women and men from designers such as Bogner, Lacoste, Hilfiger, Escada Sport, Luisa Cerano and Missoni. The company, founded in 1907, was acquired by the Heine group in two stages (in 1999 and 2001). Heine, in turn, is a member of the Otto Versand group, a giant of German mail order.

  The new owners quickly realized that the company was still using the same production methods that were typical of catalog production in the 1990s, beginning with planning layouts using scissors, paper and paste on sheets of graph paper. Advertising Manager Jurek Kulke was given the responsibility for bringing production procedures up to date and readying them for the future. That meant an immediate conversion to a digital workflow.

  With 1,600 pages printed annually for the main hunting-related catalog and 1,200 pages for the fashion catalog (distributed among 12 catalogs and mailings), this required a huge investment in conversion, a task that fell to Claudia Ehling, team leader of the production department, who also holds a degree in marketing.

T  o begin with, just laying out the pages was a major challenge. On top of that was the print production itself, as 20% of the pages are printed in gravure and 80% in web offset. The company uses several printers: three for gravure and more than five for web offset. An additional seven printers are involved in sheet-fed work, as well as continuous-forms printing.

  For prepress, Frankonia selected Peter Becker GmbH, led by Ottmar Goldstein, with headquarters in W9Frzburg and branches in Wolfsburg and Munich. Goldstein was trained in prepress and had experienced first-hand the transformation of the prepress and printing industry. It had been Frankonia's practice to provide the web-press printers, each of which had very different printing guidelines, with materials that were tailored to their individual requirements. This required a very costly page production and data conversion effort for every printing project. Therefore, Goldstein initiated a policy of largely avoiding individualized data formats.

  Sticking to Standards

  Kulcke and Ehling quickly concluded that only a completely standardized production process could work. They decided that in the future, the only print-ready files they would provide, whether to gravure or to web-offset printers, would be those that conformed to Process Standard Rotogravure (PSR). Web printers would receive PSR files complying with the ECI proofing standards. (The ECI, or European Color Initiative, is a European organization that has set proofing procedures, standards and proofing tools such as the Altona Suite.) Sheet-fed offset printers would also receive files in Process Standard Rotogravure for printing on ISO-Coated web offset paper. This left the printers with the task of converting the files into their own color space. Goldstein initially helped with this by converting the data to the standard for web offset color space for printers that hadn't yet mastered the process.

  This left web offset printers with the task of adjusting the tone curve to the individual dot gains in their web offset presses. Among those that dealt with this was K9Arner Rotationsdruck of Sindelfingen, which in 2002 had converted its entire prepress operation to CTP.

  K9Arner Rotationsdruck

  Founded in 1885, K9Arner Rotationsdruck had moved to the Singlefingen-Maichingen industrial park in 1964, when it became a pioneer in four-color heat-set web printing. Today it runs four Rotoman web-offset presses with eight double printing units each. They can be used either for eight-color work in 16-page format or four-color work in 32-page format. In addition, a Poliman with four double printing units for 16-page four-color work runs three shifts.
This consistent implementation of two-sided printing technology on all machines offers special advantages in providing good color matches for demanding customers. The same principle is applied in the newest K9Arner investment, an eight-unit press that is currently being installed and is scheduled be put in production this month.

  K9Arner Rotationsdruck focuses on catalog production and has built up a network of highly capable partners with related skills in the surrounding area. They include Krammer FlexoPrint for prepress, Mairs Graphische Betriebe and Holtz-Druck for sheetfed printing, SPT for lettershop work, Wennberg for finishing, and Wackler for delivery and logistics. These partnerships, coordinated by K9Arner Rotationsdruck, ensure both the quality and the timeliness of the whole production process.

  Digital Prepress

  Of the 250 employees at K9Arner Rotationsdruck, 23 work in the prepress department, which began producing digital thermal plates in July 2002. They started with the Creo Prinergy workflow and two platesetters: a Trendsetter 3244 and a Lotem Quantum 800. Rolf Schmelzer, head of the prepress department, explained the workflow in use today.

  Ninety percent of all files are delivered as PDFs and are thoroughly and automatically checked using Callas Process Prepress. Following that, the files are individually renamed according to K9Arner's naming convention so that each page will have a unique identification. The server then copies the file into the appropriate hot-folder for that job, where Prinergy picks it up and processes it. The pages are converted into an optimized PDF file (the so-called "digital master") by the Prinergy Normalizer. The process continues with trapping and ICC (International Color Consortium) color management, if needed. Then the pages are imposed using Preps and a proof is output on a Designjet 1055, reviewed and sent to the customer. Once the customer's "OK to print" comes back, the plates are imaged and sent to the pressroom.

  As a service, K9Arner offers its customers an audit of every proof it sends out for customer approval, matching it against the customer-supplied materials for content and appearance.

  Precise Color

  When Frankonia installed its digital workflow, it began proofing pages on an Iris proofer driven by GMG's Colorproof software. K9Arner accomplishes the color-space conversion using its own ICC device-link profile, which has been iteratively improved and optimized for the color of the paper. In 2003, Frankonia switched from Iris to Epson proofs, again driven by GMG. The standard ECI-PSR profile gave good results - not a 100% match with the press, but with no greater deviation than the Iris proof had. With the release of Version 4 of GMG's ColorProof at Drupa 2004, a PDF-to-PDF conversion became possible. The color-space conversion at K9Arner was then switched from ICC device-link profiles over to GMG technology because the quality of the color conversion could be enhanced. With that change, Frankonia's expectations for color standards at K9Arner were fully met. But another problem that was equally important to Frankonia remained: moir8E in images.

  FM Screening

  In web offset printing, moir8E problems show up only when the plates are on the press and the press is running, because inkjet proofs don't reproduce the screen ruling. Moir8E is not acceptable in fashion catalogs selling high-value clothing, and a lot of money is spent to avoid it.

  Running a press proof is just as expensive as the practice, common in the U.S., of making a raster proof based on transfer from pigmented sheets. By far, the least expensive approach is to use FM screening (which does not show moir8E) rather than conventional AM screening, but it is extremely challenging technically to implement.

  With conventional screening, the press operator can adjust the ink flow to match the proof. With FM screening, this is possible only to a very limited degree. The press operator can increase the ink density of the shadow areas by a large amount without affecting the midtones. This means that the control of the midtones has to be done in prepress, using a conversion that exactly matches the requirements of the web press. This is precisely what Rolf Schmelzer achieved for PSR files with his first Frankonia catalog in early 2005, and since then all Frankonia catalogs at K9Arner have been printed using FM screening.

  This was only possible because Rolf Schmelzer had standardized the entire production process around Process Standard Offset (ISO 12647-2) the year before and had maintained it within the narrow tolerances required for the 25B5m dots used in Staccato FM screening. From the beginning, K9Arner had viewed FM screening in the context of matching customer-supplied files on the press. To allow customers and data suppliers to continue to use their existing, standardized ways of working, exceptional care had gone into the conversion of incoming data for FM screening.

 Win-win Situation

  During our visit to K9Arner's plant, all the partners praised the advantages of working with standards. Ottmar Goldstein can still produce pages that his prepress partners have created for the PSR ISO standard. Jurek Kulcke and Laudia Ehling now obtain (at least when they print with K9Arner) moir8E-free, faithfully reproduced images and predictable production, which are preconditions for dependable scheduling and budgeting.

  Rolf Schmelzer benefits from predictable production, since he no longer gets any nasty surprises when he matches the proof on the press. And the head of sales and marketing for Frankonia, Bernhard Maatz, appreciates it, too. "At Frankonia, we have pushed our print quality to the limit of today's technology, and we find that our customers are also excited about this new level of quality," he said. "Our know-how means we can satisfy even the most critical and demanding clients in the catalog market. So much expense goes into photographing automobiles, fashion, accessories, jewelry and designer furniture these days that any loss of quality in printing is just unacceptable. You have to deal with that if you want to be in this business."